Re: Idea / preRFC - return value of require

On Thu, 12 Feb 2026 at 15:03, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:35:52 +0100
> Branislav Zahradník <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Expectation:
> > - first call of function will load specified module
> > - subsequent call of function will always return same value as first
> > call
> >
> > Current behaviour:
> > - subsequent call returns value true if require was successful
> > - if package-block is used, it doesn't return value of last statement
> > of block but only logical true/false
>
> It is this way intentionally.
>
> Otherwise, you have the problem of unexpected extra reference counts of
> returned values. If your final statement in the file scope yields some
> large data structure, or object that's supposed to have timely
> destruction semantics, or somesuch, then the cache will retain it for
> too long.
>

This is exactly behaviour I want in this idea.

I will be fine with expression `require :cached Foo` (naming is not
important, behaviour is)


>
> If you did want a way to load a FILE and reliably return the value from
> its final expression, you wanted `do FILE`.
>

that is tons of code I don't want to write. Yes, I can do:

 sub { require Foo; Foo->value }

but that is additional number of tokens I want to avoid.




>
> --
> Paul "LeoNerd" Evans
>
> [email protected]
> http://www.leonerd.org.uk/  |  https://metacpan.org/author/PEVANS
>